About this episode
Join host Kristin as The Grim opens the gate on one of America's most erased and overlooked histories — African American burial grounds and enslaved persons cemeteries across the United States.Records are heartbreakingly scarce. By 1860, nearly four million people were enslaved in America, yet their burial grounds remain largely undocumented, destroyed, or entirely lost. In a system that valued labor over human life, death was treated as an inconvenience. Burials were rushed, unrecorded, and hidden in remote corners of vast plantations — marked only by seashells, fieldstones, or personal objects that eroded over time. Even in death, dignity was denied.The end of slavery did not end the erasure. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation into cemeteries, and as towns expanded, undocumented Black burial grounds were paved over, declared abandoned, and legally cleared for redevelopment. This pattern was not confined to the South. In Lower Manhattan, the New York African Burial Ground — holding an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 enslaved and free African Americans — was uncovered by accident during federal construction in 1991, its dead disturbed by bulldozers before community outrage forced the project to a halt. At Arlington National Cemetery, Black refugees and United States Colored Troops soldiers were among the earliest buried, with many choosing freedom names — Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson — carved into headstones as declarations of identity long denied in life.In the years following the Civil War, African American benevolent societies built their own burial grounds — quiet acts of resistance funded not by the state, but by the community itself. From African Cemetery No. 2 in Lexington, Kentucky to Mount Pleasant Plains Cemetery in Washington D.C., these sacred spaces preserved names, identities, and legacies that official records refused to keep. Yet many remain neglected, underfunded, and under threat from gentrification and urban development to this day.The African-American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, despite its promise, carries no dedicated funding — leaving families to fight yet again for the right to protect their dead. Meanwhile, grassroots efforts like the Anson Street African Burial Ground project in Charleston offer a different model — one built on descendant collaboration, Gullah Geechee spiritual traditions, and a naming ceremony that returned humanity to ancestors stolen by silence.These grounds are still here. Beneath parking lots, behind churches, under cities that move too fast to notice who was left behind. The dead are not lost. They were buried — and then buried again by silence.Support the showSupport The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind!https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopesFind All of The Grim's Social Links At:https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia
